I wasn’t surprised by the numbers in a report released Tuesday documenting the many successes in the worldwide biotech and pharmaceutical industry. Rather, it was the ominous-sounding comments about the sustainability of that success that caught my eye.

The “ Pharma & Biotech 2013 in Review” report by EP Vantage, based on data collected by EvaluatePharma, in many ways mirrored the company’s mid-year report, which I wrote about last October. That report talked about the record number of biotech IPOs in the first six months of 2013 and the fact that the Nasdaq Biotech Index hit an all-time high in March, beating the peak it attained at the height of the biotech bubble in 2000.

The full-year report release this week talked about all that, only more so. The number of biotech IPOs continued to grow in the second half of the year to a total of 44 by EvaluatePharma’s count, plus another 17 in the first quarter of 2014. Those 61 biotech IPOs over the past 15 months have raised a total of $4 billion (By my calculation, incidentally, the 14 Massachusetts-based companies raised nearly a third of that, $1.3 billion).

Other good news for the industry: While the number of U.S. drug approvals did not break 2012’s record of 43, the expected revenue from the 33 drugs that were approved in coming years was the highest ever. Led by blockbusters like Gilead’s Sovaldi and Cambridge-based Biogen Idec’s Tecfidera, the estimated annual sales of all the drugs approved last year is more than $25 billion.

But what put a damper on the cheery tone set by all the astronomical figures contained in the report were sentences like the two that ended the summary of the report: “Few were willing to use the word bubble in 2013, but as share prices climb ever higher this will be heard more often. As such, the biggest question mark for the sector in 2014 will be the sustainability of these valuations.” Or the chief investment officer of research firm Mann BioInvest, Andy Smith, who was quoted on the next page as saying, “It is the generalist investors that arrived late and are indiscriminately investing in biotech stocks that are driving the market now. Fundamentals are not the driving force. A lot of it stems from the hope that big pharma needs products and therefore they will buy biotechs willy nilly.”

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